pfeMame v1.008

pfeMame v1.008 is released. pfeMame is a front end for the Multiple Arcade Game Emulator (MAME) written in Python. It is cross platform (tested on Linux - Ubuntu and Windows XP). It also includes a graphical Tile View designed for MAME cabinets which allows control using joystick / gamepad. pfeMame was written by Gareth Finch and started in 2014.

Features:
- Customisable game types / categories filter for display
- Graphical image 'tile' view with joystick navigation - for dedicated MAME cabinets
- Cross platform - Linux & windows
- Python source code

pfeMame v1.008 Changelog:
* Fixed a bug where if I have forgotten to delete the pfemame.ini when I am packaging up the source files, the file paths will likely be invalid – this causes a number of problems and a crash.
* Corrected the width of the game information control – it was about 2 pixels short of the RHS window border
* Made the default game image (the one displayed when there is no actual game image) transparent so that the top and bottom blend nicely into the window. The white top and bottom borders before were ugly. Had to change it from a JPG to GIF for the transparency.
* The window horizontal resize and maximize now works – the game list and associated columns grow to utilize the available space (vertical resize still does nothing – just empty space)
* When auto-finding file & folder paths, I now clear the visual pinball fields to prevent any issues when re-using old INI files.
* Fixed the annoying dead space under the buttons on the gametypes and filepaths windows under Linux. Had to put in a system specific hack as the sizers work a little differently between platforms (more likely a lack of understanding on my part on how to do this correctly).
* Fixed the message and game info box background colours in WindowsXP. XP panel colour is different that WindowsXP and Linux. The right way to make them the same is inherit from the panel colour.
* Added a Clear button next to the Messages box so that you can clear old messages – sometimes useful to know that the messages you are looking at relate to the rom just run rather than an old one.
* Implemented a vastly faster method for displaying the game information – turns out that indexing very large lists is way slower than using the find method on large strings. Now when you are scrolling through the list, the scroll speed is a lot faster and you don’t have those very slight pauses when a game doesn’t have any history info (it was having to iterate through the history.dat file all the way to the end in the previous code version before it would reaslise there is no match)
* Updated my implementation of the systems support. Now that I have a better understanding of how the softlists work in the HASH folder, I realised that my previous implementation would not let cheats work for systems. Also, MAME expects the systems programs to be in the roms folder, not another arbitrary folder. The code has been updated to now use the softlist ‘short’ name for calling the system. If it can’t find a short name match then it will revert to the previous brute-force method of calling the program. See the updated manual on how all of this works. You will notice that it takes longer to build the games database during a refresh as it has to try and find the short name for every systems program that you have.
* Force a database refresh on first time run in order to support the updated systems code
* Added an additional column for the systems short name
* Updated screen shots and manual
* Systems folder path has been hardcoded to be the same as the roms folder path (regardless of what you set it to). MAME requires that systems programs be put in the same folder as roms (its hard coded that way). If I don’t see them make this an option in the next few releases then I will remove all reference to the systems folder path.
* The manual now includes the instructions on how to build pfeMAME from source
* Moved the old startup wait dialog from the icons loading section to the main code section as it makes more sense to make it obvious to the user that the application is still loading and starting up so please wait.
* Good tidy up of the OnDatabaseRefresh code. There was code repetition that was unnecessary and ugly. Nice tidy up.
* During normal loading, after reading the temporary database into memory, it was then writing it out again when this is only necessary after a full database refresh. Fixed this.
* Main window default vertical size reduced to fit within a 768 pixel vertical screen size. This size is very common with laptops (like my one at work). You can still adjust the window size to suit.
* Major improvement to the code that is used to read/write various dat files – there was too much unnecessary code repetition and it was difficult to read.
* Changed the nesting of the sizers on the main screen. The game information box now goes to the bottom of the panel.
* Main window contents will grow vertically to take up available space when the window is resized.
* When doing a search, the first row of the results is forced to the top of the games list.
* Added the Game Category to the search field so that you can for example search for Maze games
* When right clicking a game, you can select to not use the softlist HASH file short name, and instead use the full path name. Useful as some systems short names just don’t work properly.
* Fixed a bug that would cause a crash if the path to MAME executable was invalid when refreshing the database.
* Have specified startup window location to be 0,0 regardless of running in source or as a compiled distribution. Was previously using wx.defaultposition but this didn’t have the safe result in all situations.




Download: pfeMame v1.008 x86
Download: pfeMame v1.008 x64
Source: Here